IF NOT OUR WAY THEN NO WAY

The Right has long held the idea that any Democratic electoral victory is illegitimate. This was the underlying explanation for everything they did during both the Clinton and Obama Administrations, though it was never clearly stated by anyone on that side.

That is now changing.

Following the thrashing David Perdue received in the Georgia primary election, with Governor Kemp receiving 75% of the vote, the MAGA right has determined this can only be the result of fraud. Trump himself first “truthed” (that’s a tweet at his “Truthy” Twitter ripoff) that it is impossible for someone to get 75% of the vote “in our electoral system.” He must have missed the historical fact that it is so common as to be unremarkable for an incumbent - of either party - to get vote totals over 70% of the votes cast in primaries where they are opposed.

Anytime we don’t win, it’s because the other side cheated. The system is rigged against us.

Oh my goodness! Donald Trump doesn’t know how things work??! Pass me the smelling salts, Martha!

One of the things right wing movements do when they take over a democratic state is question the results of elections and anything else that doesn’t go their way, claiming they are persecuted by the system, and raising doubt among enough of the population over how the system works that their lies are believed and people come to see the democratic system as flawed and untrustworthy.

That’s been going on a long time here, but only recently has the Right been explicit in their questioning of democracy and their unwillingness to accept any decision that goes against their desired result.

This is very apparent right now with the acquittal yesterday of Michael Sussman in the only case brought by Special Attorney John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Barr in May 2019 to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation after the conclusion of the Mueller investigation. It became an article of faith in MAGA World that Durham would prove it was Clinton, not Trump, who was colluding with Vladimir Putin.

The fantasy came crashing down with the jury’s unanimous vote of “not guilty” after six hours of deliberation. And the Right is now going crazy over the decision.

Since everything the Right does is, well, right and correct, such a decision can only be the result of the entire system being rigged against them. Trials held in the nation’s capital are by nature bound to go in favor of the left, since only four percent of the voters in D.C. ever voted for Trump, according to former acting attorney general and inventor of the toilet bowl for men with big penises, Matthew Whitaker.

Appearing on the Fox propaganda channel last night, he blathered, “This looks more like a jury nullification, where even though the evidence was overwhelming, even though they, the government, proved their case, that the jury just decided that this wasn’t a case worth pursuing.”

This is now the Right’s go-to explanation for their failure to convict Sussman.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway described the result as an “existential threat to the country,” saying that it represents “two standards of justice, one where friends of the regime can do anything and get off scot-free and one where opponents of the regime will have their lives destroyed for things that friends of the regime can do.”

Notice how she now calls a Democratic political administration a “regime,” a term connoting illegitimacy.

MAGA “news” outlet American Greatness published an article on the day of the verdict titled “Clinton’s Plot Came Closer To Succeeding Than January 6 Ever Did.” The article goes on to claim Sussmann’s acquittal is due to the presence of “Clinton donors” on the jury, while rehashing the old claims of a grand conspiracy to smear Trump by association with Russia. It goes on to say “There’s only one rule in D.C. the Justice Department consistently enforces—all laws and norms exist to preserve and extend the Democratic Party’s monopoly over key institutions. That’s why the 2016 plotters walk free while the January 6 defendants rot in jail without trial or bail.”

If not our justice, then no justice.

With the acquittal and associated defeat for Durham’s investigation, National Review published an editorial calling on the probe to continue, claiming Durham erred in treating the FBI as a victim, and not as part of the Democrat-law enforcement complex that needs to be opposed and exposed.

Trump posted on his “Truth Social,” “Our Legal System is CORRUPT, our Judges (and Justices!) are highly partisan, compromised or just plain scared, our Borders are OPEN, our Elections are Rigged, Inflation is RAMPANT, gas prices and food costs are ‘through the roof,’ our Military ‘Leadership’ is Woke, our Country is going to HELL, and Michael Sussmann is not guilty.”

It’s not just with court decisions like this. More importantly, the Republicans are taking aim at the very system of democratic elections that underpins our government.

Elections are, actually, pretty difficult to rig. But the danger in a wave of partisans entering election offices around the country comes from their ability to produce trumped up accounts of supposed fraud — even if they’re referring to perfectly legal procedures or minor mistakes. According to a report in Politico, Republicans appear to be laying the groundwork for potentially overturning legitimate election results.

In recordings Politico obtained, Matthew Seifried, the Republican Party’s election integrity director for Michigan is heard stressing to GOP activists that becoming an actual poll worker, one paid and ostensibly trained by a local government, would be better than simply volunteering as a challenger observing the process.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than as a poll challenger,” Seifried said. At another meeting, he said, “Ideally, you guys will all be the election inspector. You have so much more authority because you’re the one that’s actually administering the election.”

Seifried said the party was preparing to equip poll workers with a direct line to GOP attorneys, so that they could “live chat” on Election Day. On another recording, he said the party was recruiting lawyers and that he wanted to “start reaching out to law enforcement.”

Seifried separately identified three Democratic areas with large populations of voters of color — Detroit, Pontiac and Southfield — as “the ones that we need to focus all our efforts on.”

The plan includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

Separately, Politico obtained Zoom records of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, a self-described “election-integrity group” run by the Thomas More Society, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”

Installing party loyalists on the Board of Canvassers, which is responsible for certifying the election, also appears to be part of the GOP strategy in Michigan. In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Republicans nominated to their board a man who said he would not have certified the 2020 election.

We can see how this will operate already. MAGA candidates are already refusing to accept the results in Republican primaries that they do not win.

Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group said, “This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together. It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.” He believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures, who declined to take such steps in 2020.

The fascist coup is being planned and organized in public. Right in front of us.

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